I imported my UBB Threads database and every single forum ID (we have over 400 sites) just changed. Why? Now every old link in our system and archives has broken, and I have to go through my live site and update every ID number to point to its new match - and there's no rhyme nor reason as to the change. I can't just subtract 2 everywhere, sometimes it's off by 1, sometimes by 4, etc.

UBB7 is a new product, from the ground up... You can't even really call it UBB.threads (other than the fact UBB.Threads7 was the name chosen for it). When things where imported, they where assigned new id's; this counts for users, posts, forums, threads, categories, etc.

You can use the redirector scripts that come with the UBB7 import files to redirect _old_ links to _new_ links.

The redirector script doesn't do that. It doesn't know what the old ID was, to equate it to the new ID. I had to go into my live system database and change every ID by hand, to get at least the main links working. Every old URL in our system, in newsletters and articles and such - are all now invalid. The links to the "low carb forum" at ID xxx now point to the Entertainment News forum, because the ID has changed.

I agree the software is changed. But I don't see the need to randomly change the IDs of forum rows in the database, since they had IDs in the old system and IDs in the new system.

Topic/Posts/Forum id's should have transversed, they should be in the import_maps table which works only for the redirectors...

If you mean by transversed that the forum ID should have remained the same from the old to the new software, that isn't the case. Every forum ID except the first few (maybe IDs 1-10) changed. Some changed by 1, some changed by 2 and so on up to 4 I believe.

The redirectors send the incoming person to the wrong destination forum based on the ID #.

No, that isn't what i meant.

All of the id's of the old forums, posts, threads, users, etc should be stored in a separate table (import_maps), which only the redirector scripts use to send users to the proper locations.

The redirectors should have come with your importer.

FWIW, I remember having the same problem when I imported. But since no one else was complaining about it, I figured it was just me...

No bug, everything is re-indexed when inserted into the new MySQL database; the import_map was added in one of the early versions when we where tinkering with the importers, so the old data could reach the proper new locations.

True, the re-directors included with the import scripts *should* re-direct everyone to the correct place.

Here's an original URL -

http://forums.bellaonline.com/postlist.php?Cat=0&Board=225

all the redirector - the one supplied by UBB - does is send the person to the new forum's home page.

If I use the new forum URL with the old ID, it goes to the wrong board completely. So I just finished re-coding my entire live site with all new forum IDs. However, this doesn't help all those old URLs hard coded into articles and such.

If you believe the redirector is broken, I'd be pleased to see how that is to be fixed.